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What a thing Terry Cavanagh has done. What a thing. He’s only gone and inspired a new wave of game designers to go forth and do smart things with ultra-minimalism and design purity. Super Hexagon is and will be, I suspect a more important game than anyone expects, even though it’s already highly feted in The Right Circles. While there will doubtless be more cynical clones, there’s also so much to be explored in terms of simple shapes, reflex-based strategy and immaculate mastery of tiny movements. Chaotic, a free game by one amidos2006, will be one of Super Hexagon’s many, many children, and its approach is to look at Cavanagh’s game of precision spinning through the looking glass.
Rather than trying to sucessfully navigate out of an ever-changing angular labyrinth which forever speeds towards you, here you’re trapped forever inside it, able to move within only a miniscule area as the walls irregularly stab at at you, and death-on-contact foes drift towards you in increasingly higher numbers. You’re a cornered rat, essentially, and while you automatically spray bullets all over the place, directing where they take themselves simultaneously with dodging enemies which slip through their net en masse is high pressure stuff.

Initially I was all “yeah, this is breeze” but within minutes I’m “aaah I can’t do this”.

Sure, its debt is an obvious one, but it’s an acknowledged one – and even so, it’s nothing like a clone. It takes the aesthetic and the concept of precision then does something smart and tense with it. Take a look, in your browser, for no-pennies.

“Rather than trying to sucessfully navigate out of an ever-changing angular labyrinth which forever speeds towards you, here you’re trapped forever inside it, able to move within only a miniscule area as the walls irregularly stab at at you”

Eh? No you’re not. You can move around the whole screen. Those stabby things are just background. No wonder you were having so much trouble…

Super Hexagon has been my favorite game so far this year. That is not something I would have thought is possible from a mobile game, but it ticks all the right boxes and is very compulsive. For anyone with long commutes and owning a Apple or Android phone, try this out and see how fun travelling can become!

Open Hexagon- the original child- has had a flurry of support from its developer. It’s gone a very different way than had Super Hexagon, and is constantly being more and more polished and expanded.

I think that in a comparison of the two, Open Hexagon is the better. Not first, maybe, but its iterations upon the theme makes it the superior Hexagon. I would say that RPS should take another look at it as it moves into version 1.9. It got a lot of hate when it was first released, but a few months down the line, a revisit is warranted, given the current difference between the two.